Commodore 64 Pirate Copy versus Legitimate Copy
- Thread starter Jack Booted Thug
- Start date
Elite and Frontier were both originals. I was always a sucker for the big, impressive box full of maps and manuals, overlays and posters and the like. Even if the game was crap the packaging gave it an air of quality that made you persist in trying to find some ounce of playability in the whole thing.
'But... it must be good! It was fifteen quid and has all this... stuff in the box! I should play it again, in case I'm missing something...'
'But... it must be good! It was fifteen quid and has all this... stuff in the box! I should play it again, in case I'm missing something...'
Heh, I grew up a missionary kid in Central America. There weren't any computer stores let alone game stores. No internet either. I think a visiting friend brought us an old C64 back in 1995ish and that was the best toy I'd seen since my slinky broke. You could say we were a bit behind the times as I was playing C64 and VIC20 long after most people in the US had their little intel 486 PC and by the time I built my first 486 computer my US friends have 500MHz beasts.
I have no clue if the copy of Elite I had was legitimate or not. It probably reached my grubby little paws the same way every other computer game did - the missionary center somehow mysteriously acquired it in their "free stuff sent down by generous Americans" box and I claimed it as mine and took it home with me. The games we got never had boxes or manuals or maps or other awesome stuff like that. Most of the time they arrived in bulk: a big box full of random floppies that we would pick through like vultures looking for anything with a halfway interesting title. We never even knew if a particular floppy was a game or if it was just an adventurously named piece of office software.
Of course, ever since I got back to the US and got my first job and started making money... well, first thing I did was go back and buy most of the games I loved playing as a child. GoG and Steam are wonderful things. I no longer have to worry about losing a precious disk because as long as I can get internet access I can always re-download them.
I think the whole concept of DRM is flawed. Yes, there are and always will be those few people who just want to pirate something in order to make money. The rest of us just want to play a video game. I didn't have the money or the place to spend it so for me, buying the game wasn't an option. The two options that were available to me were:
1) Get the game for free from an unknown source and play it and enjoy it and fall in love with it and later on in life notice a kickstarter and go crazy with excitement and pledge a bunch of money and tell all my friends about this super awesome game that's being designed.... or
2) Not touch the game because I wasn't purchasing it legitimately and never come to love it and keep an eye out for successors and follow blogs and articles and watch for any hint of a followup and thus miss out on this exciting opportunity to play the latest and greatest attempt at the biggest space trading/combat game of all time.
Any time I was in a position to purchase a game legitimately, I did. Any time I wasn't able to do so, I did my best to obtain the game some other way. Doing so would not have negatively affected the developers any more than if I'd simply never touched the game and in most cases I probably served at least as free marketing.
So I guess there should be a third option for the poll: It doesn't matter. The point is, I played the original Elite and that's why I'm here today.
Flame on
I have no clue if the copy of Elite I had was legitimate or not. It probably reached my grubby little paws the same way every other computer game did - the missionary center somehow mysteriously acquired it in their "free stuff sent down by generous Americans" box and I claimed it as mine and took it home with me. The games we got never had boxes or manuals or maps or other awesome stuff like that. Most of the time they arrived in bulk: a big box full of random floppies that we would pick through like vultures looking for anything with a halfway interesting title. We never even knew if a particular floppy was a game or if it was just an adventurously named piece of office software.
Of course, ever since I got back to the US and got my first job and started making money... well, first thing I did was go back and buy most of the games I loved playing as a child. GoG and Steam are wonderful things. I no longer have to worry about losing a precious disk because as long as I can get internet access I can always re-download them.
I think the whole concept of DRM is flawed. Yes, there are and always will be those few people who just want to pirate something in order to make money. The rest of us just want to play a video game. I didn't have the money or the place to spend it so for me, buying the game wasn't an option. The two options that were available to me were:
1) Get the game for free from an unknown source and play it and enjoy it and fall in love with it and later on in life notice a kickstarter and go crazy with excitement and pledge a bunch of money and tell all my friends about this super awesome game that's being designed.... or
2) Not touch the game because I wasn't purchasing it legitimately and never come to love it and keep an eye out for successors and follow blogs and articles and watch for any hint of a followup and thus miss out on this exciting opportunity to play the latest and greatest attempt at the biggest space trading/combat game of all time.
Any time I was in a position to purchase a game legitimately, I did. Any time I wasn't able to do so, I did my best to obtain the game some other way. Doing so would not have negatively affected the developers any more than if I'd simply never touched the game and in most cases I probably served at least as free marketing.
So I guess there should be a third option for the poll: It doesn't matter. The point is, I played the original Elite and that's why I'm here today.
Flame on